From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <30a861a9c8a7a63c0e69d46049d70908@caldo.demon.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] blanks in file names
From: forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk
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Date: Thu,  4 Jul 2002 10:41:48 +0100
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>>Is there agreement on this? Or is something else I'm also missing?

not exactly.  i think there's an implication though about the uniform
implementation of quoting rules throughout the system so that
	read(filename)
	open(dirname + "/" + filename)
would work because `filename' and `dirname' etc haven't any quotes,
because lines read from standard input (say) have been parsed.
some programs do so already but the conventions vary from place to place.
essentially, strings inside programs are in their parsed form and
strings read and written by a program are expected to be suitably quoted.
thus
	ls | mumble
would work because mumble will apply the standard rules (might be as simple
as calling tokenize consistently) to each line of its input, and thus unquote it
to reveal the original file names.

i say it's not just file names particularly; for instance, input to a program might
be fields
	when where howmuch why who
allowing
	15/9/1660 London 4d 'First Cup of Tea' 'Saml Pepys'
and with suitable changes comm, sort, etc. could be applied in obvious ways.